With the advent of digital central office exchanges and digital private branch exchanges (PBXs), there has been an increase in the number of services available to telephone subscribers. These services include call forwarding, call transfer, three way calling or mini-conferencing, direct distance dialing, toll-free numbers and many others. The availability of these services has led to the development of applications and commercial activity specifically tailored to exploit these new features and functions. However due to differences in telephone company policies from different localities, the implementation of these new services has not been uniformly distributed. This in turn has also led to the desirability of gaining the capability of using a specific locality's telephone services from within another locality. Almost all solutions seen thus far has been geared towards a system integration model suited for small to medium sized entities or, if not, towards specialized, single use devices with limited functionality. Until now.
The present invention, in one embodiment, answers these needs by offering a single device designed for individual use and installation. It embodies a means of utilizing the services of the telephone company in one locality in a manner which can be remotely initiated and controlled by a user in another locality. Almost all of the services provided by the telephone company in the invention's locality is thus accessible and can be utilized by a remote user. Furthermore, because of the diversity of the services being offered by the different telephone companies, the present invention has been designed to be flexible enough to perform several functions and can be adapted to function in as many localities as possible.